


it's a small world - réitérer.

by jetjumped



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8568316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jetjumped/pseuds/jetjumped
Summary: Third time's the charm when it comes to catching each other and holding on tight.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [croixmeridies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/croixmeridies/gifts).



> Happy belated birthday !! Apologies in advance for the most nonsensical piece of writing I've ever produced aaa

_Oasis: 2144_

It’s rather bizarre reading medical journals kept by another A. Ziegler from some distant era, bizarre but comforting to see each double exclamation mark accompanied by a small, smiling curve beneath the two dots. If Mercy didn’t document most things digitally these days, she could have imagined their handwriting looking much the same. 

Her eyes roam over the text, stopping exactly where she knows the good doctor began her nanobiology research for the first time. Side-notes, squeezed in between the margins, accompany the whole manuscript like a running commentary and at others, not like a commentary at all. Where one note might read “take advantage of membrane properties”, the next would say “7pm - don’t be late, wine” penned in beside a complex chemical reaction. That note lay somewhere in the middle of the journal, underlined with one bold stroke.

Mercy hums, turning two dozen pages into the future to where the next oddly irrelevant reminder lay. 

> _bring scarf tomorrow, 3:30pm!!_

Another curve beneath the exclamation marks, and another reminder just one page over. She wonders what a doctor from the year 2016 would have done at 3:30pm with a scarf. Maybe it had been particularly cold that day, or was she going somewhere that was? Did someone else need a scarf? The journal held no such answer for her there, and its abrupt ending was always a little disappointing. Half of Mercy wanted a sequel, the one filled with research that had apparently burnt up in A. Ziegler’s lab. The other half was more or less content imagining a happy ending, because god, if _those_ weren’t in short supply these days.

Mercy closes the book softly, slipping it back between the others on her shelf. One day, someone would finish the doctor’s research, but it wouldn’t be her. She tugs on her mask and goggles, tapes the gap between her sleeves and gloves, and pulls in a heavy breath of filtered air. _In another life perhaps_ , she thinks, spinning the lock to the vault door before pressing her full weight against the metal and pushing outwards with slow measured steps.

* * *

 

_Watchpoint: 2016_

The alarm is set for 1500, with a snooze button allowing for an extra three minute lie in… if “lie” is the right word for it. Hunched over her desk with her cheek pressed up against the keyboard doesn’t count as lying in, Angela muses, thumb blindly tapping at her screen to pause the incessant beeping until she has to sit up, bleary eyed, and forcefully jab her index finger against it.

Sticky notes border her computer screen, similar sheafs of yellow slotted in between the pages of her journal, the most recent of which spells out her 3:30pm plan for the day.

Tomorrow… she had written that last night at two, maybe three in the morning. Did that count as last night? No, probably not.   

> \- _tomorrow,_ _3:30pm!!_

She swears, standing up with enough force to send her swivel chair careening across the room. It’s a decision poorly made for now she has to retrieve the scarf draped over the back of the seat - well, now it’s on the floor, isn’t it - go find a suitable jacket, and meet Amélie at least a thirty minute walk from her university’s research facility. If her colleagues knew she was postponing a century’s worth of groundbreaking research for a half an hour break spent, what, _ice skating_ , she doesn’t know what they’d do with her.

Well, likely nothing really. 

Angela took few breaks on the job, if any, and it had taken a great deal of effort on the dancer’s part persuading her to come out this one afternoon. A great deal of effort and yet somehow, Amélie makes it seem so straightforward that Angela isn’t sure how she, the budding doctor already married to her work, is convinced that visiting the city’s Winter Wonderland ’16 is the relatively productive course of action. It isn’t, and she’s going anyway. 

* * *

Amélie skates with a casual grace mirrored in her dancing, figure skates evidently suiting her tastes just as much as pointe shoes. She could spin circles around Angela, leaving fine figure eights as barely scraped tracks for the postgrad medical student to follow. In focusing so intently on placing one foot in front of the other without falling forward, the fact that Amélie has paused right in front of her fails to process and it’s a wonder she manages to follow through with grasping the offered hand, gliding to a halt before she makes a fool of herself.

“Watch your step, _docteur_.”

“You know that title is far off, Amélie.”

The dancer only smirks, skates tapping a silent rhythm against the ice as her feet weave between one another in an elegant grapevine step.

“Perhaps, but the whole world will know your name sooner than later.”

Angela takes her eyes off the ice tracks, only to be met by Amélie’s gaze twinkling with some hint of mirth. Amélie doesn’t even try to pretend she hadn’t been watching her and clearly there’s something about Angela’s expression that pulls her own into a smile.

“What?” 

“Would it be entirely out of the question if I asked you to stay out a little longer?”

It takes some thought but Angela decides that no, it’s - “Not _entirely_ out of the question, yet I can’t imagine you intend to keep me skating through dinner, too.”

Amélie fakes offense. “Oh mon dieu, no need to ruin my evening plans, chérie.”

“Then I have no choice.” Angela’s grip tightens around Amélie’s hand, but before she can do anything brash - if anything Angela did could be considered as such - Amélie squeezes back and shoots off at a breakneck pace with the doctor in tow. Their laughter, light and soft, mingles easily with the tap-tapping of their skates moving as one.

* * *

 

_Agen, France: 2206_

Angela rocks back in her chair with ease, allowing herself a moment to listen to a robin’s far off evening chorus before returning to the view of grape vines doused in golden light. It’s the sort of sight one can never really get used to, even though she’s certain she knows exactly how the bricks of the house glow in the sun’s warmth; the slant of light when it finally dips below the fields that outline the horizon and only the slate tiles of the roof can bask in gold. The leaves might rustle in a gentle summer breeze and her breathing might give way to a sigh, but it’s all perfect silence as far as she is concerned.

_A moment to enjoy some peace and quiet._

The door handle twists slowly, creaking despite all Amélie’s efforts.

_Probably just a moment, though._

“Lemonade for you, chérie?”

She allows herself a smile, and the moment goes on.

* * *

 

_Oasis: 2144_

With the unpredictable crackling of a warm hearth’s fire but by no means as gentle, particles of grain and dust pepper the scratched goggles shielding Mercy’s eyes. She still finds herself squinting in an effort to see further than the five foot radius generously permitted by the desert storm, and retreating isn’t on the cards given how far she’s already trekked. That is to say, thirty feet. Thirty feet up a slope where it feels like with each step forward she slides two steps back. Yet by some great feat of determination, Mercy manages to struggle all the way to its precipice and peer over the edge, down to a bunker identical to the one behind her that peeks out from beneath the sand.

“Gibraltar” the chipped paint would have read before the cylindrical tower had burrowed itself deeper, carrying all those inside with it. Mercy used to have hope when she discovered both vault _Oasis_ and _Antartica’s_ empty cryostasis pods, a little less hope when their previous occupants never showed up, and no discernible fragment of hope when _Gibraltar_ shed light on questions she had half-hoped didn’t have answers.

Planting both feet in the sand, she stumbles towards the vault door left ajar. A warning sign printed on both sides of the metal insists she close it for the safety of _Gibraltar_ staff. Mercy ignores it and slips through, wiping the grit from her glasses.

Emergency generators had done what they could to light the stairwell that spirals more than a dozen floors deep, yet half the lights flicker and the others are either shattered or must have blown their fuse at some point or another. 

_Bedauerlich_. 

Anything but unprepared, the ex-doctor retrieves a light stick from a pouch at her hip and begins her descent.

* * *

 

_Watchpoint: 2016_

It’s all smoke and heat, searing her eyes even when she squeezes them shut tightly. Yet she needs to know where she’s going, needs to find -

The lab door swings open with force enough to have broken Angela’s nose if she hadn’t been one fortunate step further from it. She can’t hear what they’re saying, why they’re pulling her by the sleeve of her lab coat - no, she knows why, the building is on _fire_. And her research, oh, her _research_. She’s ready to dive back into the smoke and would have if not for another pair of hands that lift her down a stairwell to the fire exit, far from her life’s work. Angela thinks she’s screaming, thinks she’s kicked someone or at least elbowed a colleague in the face, but it’s only the white noise ringing behind her ears that resonates for a long while. 

It’s all gone, her breakthrough - she knows they won’t find a shred of it left behind. And so they’ll offer her a new lab, state of the art facilities. Back home in Switzerland no less. Angela can’t turn them down for her work has always come first, the prospect of saving lives always more important than her personal one. 

Saying farewell to the dancer after a year’s shared memories plays on a loop in her mind until she _knows_ their lives weren’t meant to stay entwined. Not this time.

* * *

 

_Oasis: 2144_

Ten floors deep lie twenty three pods, all gleaming with a faint blue light that never fails to bounce off the thick glass and illuminate the faces of those within. It’s the frost, lightly covering their shells, which leaves them anonymous; dark silhouettes cast unmoving. Anonymous - if not for the fading names all spelt out in block capitals along the side of each pod. If they were meant to be underlined, it’s some sick joke to have the heart rate monitor display its own flatline beneath them. Beyond the gentle thrumming of each machine, Mercy can just about hear the high pitched note ringing consistently. A sound that had always meant it was up to her to save them before it was too late - and  _now_ was the blatant definition of "too late."

The seventh cryostasis pod hasn’t completely frozen over since Mercy’s last visit and so it’s a shock to see the faint glove marks that had scraped away the ice just one month ago. She realises she had been the one to do that. Who else could it have been?

Mercy places a gloved hand on the chilled surface. She remembers the last time she traced the gentle curve of Amélie’s cheek and thought to herself in a moment of blinding clarity that this was love.

> _“How does forever sound?”_
> 
> _ “Faire des châteaux en Espagne."  _
> 
> _“Until the end of my days, then.”_
> 
> _“And mine.”_

They had planned for life outside, and then when it got worse, for life in _Gibraltar_. Angela “Mercy” Ziegler hadn’t planned for loneliness.

_Ç’est la vie._

* * *

 

_Agen, France: 2206_

“I never properly thanked you.”

“… For what?” Loosely twisting a grape off its stem, Angela pops the fruit in her mouth and chews. Perfectly sweet - they simply _had_ to harvest tomorrow and no later.

Amélie doesn’t reply at first, stealing the next grape from the doctor’s red stained fingers as she joins her among the grapevines. After a moment spent savouring its flavour, she turns to meet Angela’s level gaze. 

“À l'impossible nul n'est tenu, but you _are_ a miracle worker, Angela.”

“Only sometimes, liebe.”

“Non, non, you misunderstand me.”

Taking Angela’s hand in both her own, Amélie urges the doctor to feel the warmth behind each fingertip pressed to her palm. No ice creeps through her veins as it once had, and instead they’re filled with a steady pulse, quickened by the way Angela smiles softly, comprehending. 

She doesn’t expect the doctor’s eyes to suddenly brim full of tears, not shedding more than the one drop Amélie watches slide to her cheek before she lifts a hand to brush it aside. 

Sometimes Amélie dreams of the Widowmaker, sometimes she remembers how painfully good it felt to hold a rifle in her hands and pull the trigger. And sometimes Angela dreams of days when a woman with Amélie’s face would coldly stare beyond her, sometimes she wakes up worried that saving her had been the dream before that. In another life, she thinks it had been.

But here they were, _finally_ stood before the setting sun that marks the passing of another day spent safe in each other’s company.

And here you are, they think. 

Here you are.


End file.
